It is really amazing to see how mobility has changed the face of health care: a representative from Philips recently stated that now over 30% of the business comes from the home health care industry. Yes, that same Philips who made the flat screen in your living room has a very successful business providing the high tech medical world with communication devices.
With over 4000 mobile apps made specifically for healthcare professionals it shouldn’t come as a shock that these costs are starting to add up for many organizations within the healthcare industry.
We recently attended a Home Health Care Conference for Home Care Home Base and it was an enlightening experience. First off – I have never seen conference attendees more engaged and excited during the whole conference even at 3pm on a Friday afternoon.
Secondly, their software is really a wonderful piece. HCHB offers a completely wireless automated solution for home health care providers. The software drastically increases productivity of service providers who manage home health care patients.
In fact, we’ve had the pleasure of working with some great clients who also happen to subscribe to Homecare Homebase’s solution. In every case, we’ve been able avoid significant costs by utilizing some key strategies:
1. Track and Audit the bill
This is always our first tactic. It is amazing how much can be saved once you study the bill and then determine the proper fit. After examining one client’s bill during our initialsavings analysis, we saw that they were about to go over their allotted minutes by mega amounts. We quickly signed them up for our service, changed their rate plans before the bill cycle closed and saved them about $11,000 in overage charges that one month. That was about 1 months’ worth of billing just by looking at the bill and seeing the minutes didn’t match the usage.
2. Track personal versus business productivity
Many of the Home Care providers do not require voice services. That is, all of their services can be completed with electronic forms. Because of this, many providers provide a smart phone and can bill back for voice charges. If you do not have an easy way to identify voice charges, it can difficult to recoup these charges. Because we get downloads scraped from the internet, we can provide detailed information about voice charges and bill back employees for all or part of this voice usage. Additionally, tablets are now an option; however, if the clinician needs voice services they will not have a device that is easy to use for this purpose.
3. Negotiate using your software provider as leverage
We have been able to leverage the software provider with the carriers to provide excellent opportunities to the customer. Some of the Home Health providers have certain partners who can provide services to the end user at reduced or no fees because of their relationship with the software provider and/or carrier. We have been successful using these relationships to help provide additional services (programming, activating, maintaining) for devices that we might otherwise have had additional fees. Ask the carriers and your software providers what they might be able to do to get additional services for you for no charge.
4. Use Device Management Software for real time alerts and reporting
Real time reporting is a valuable tool in cost avoidance. We use tools that can provide for real time data retrieval, push alerts for GPS fencing and give us notifications of usage changes. This access to real time reporting acts as a major factor in eliminating costs before they even begin and enables us to more tightly manage the plans to usage.
5. RFP
If you are in a specialized business, it is always good to re-source your agreements and re-compete (as one of our customers calls it) the business. This can be a very powerful process in significantly reducing the overall charges and getting access to additional services which might otherwise go unaddressed unless an RFP arises. We have typically been able to save between 10% and 20% on total bills from what customers are spending today. Please note that this also can be effected by your software provider who may have improved their partner agreements with the carrier since you last executed your contract.
We enjoy working with the home health care providers and believe it is a true value to our economy and aging population. Let’s see what we can do to help stop the bleeding in order to reduce your wireless bills.
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